What if every subject that we think about can have explicit representations in our computers?

Tag Archives: SemTech Conference

I am back from Semantic Technology Conference. It is becoming bigger and bigger each year. This year there were more than hundred sessions, full day of tutorials, product exhibition. It was quite crowded and energizing.

Just some random observations:

– Oracle improves RDF / OWL support in 11g database, considers RDF/OWL as strategic/enabling technologies which will be leveraged in future versions of Oracle products.

– Yahoo uses RDF to organize content on various web sites. It also introduced SearchMonkey – extension to Yahoo search platform which allows to provide more detailed information about information resources.

– Consumer oriented web sites powered by semantic technologies are here. Twine, Freebase, Powerset are good examples, more to come.

– Resource Oriented Architecture and RDF could be a very powerful combination. More and more people understand the value of exposing data through URIs in the form of information resources.Linked Data initiative looks quite interesting.

– Some advanced semantic applications use knowledge representation formalisms that go beyond basic RDF/OWL model.
But RDF/OWL can be used to surface/exchange information based on W3C standards. Lots of discussions about
information provenance, trust, “semantic spam”.

– It looks like there is a workable solution (compromise) for ’Web’s Identity Crisis’. The idea is to reserve HTTP 303 (“See Other”) code for indication of “Concept URIs”. 303 response should include an additional URI for “See Other” information resource. This approach combined
with new PURL -like servers allows to keep RDF “as is” and to implement something close to the idea of Published Subject Identifiers

– Franz demonstrated a new version of AllegroGraph 64-bit RDFStore. Franz implemented support for Named Graphs (can be used for representing weights, trust factors, provenance)
and incorporated geospatial and temporal libraries. Named Graphs allow to deal with contexts using RDF.

– Doug Lenat did a great presentation on the conference about the history of Cyc project. It looks like in 5-10 years we can expect “artificial intelligent assistants” with quite sophisticated abilities to reason.